The Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian monarchs imposed large tributes of silver on the conquered nations of Asia, and at a later period the treasures thus amassed by a long line of despots came into the possession of Alexander the Great, and finally of the Romans, who absorbed all the riches of Carthage and the East. In the reign of Augustus, the tables of the wealthy senators groaned under silver dishes weighing from one hundred to five hundred pounds; silver statues of their ancestors decorated their apartments, and they not seldom performed their luxurious ablutions in baths of silver. Mirrors of this metal were in frequent use among a people to whom the art of applying a lustrous amalgam to the back of a plate of glass was unknown. The skill of the artist not seldom added an inestimable value to the intrinsic worth of an embossed or chiselled silver vase, and Pliny mentions several works of this kind which enjoyed a world-wide celebrity. The most ancient silver mines of which we have any historical account were situated in the mountainous parts of Chaldæa and in Spain. With the development of the Grecian States, Eastern Europe also began to furnish its contingent. Silver mines were discovered and worked in the Pangæan Mountains, between Macedonia and Thrace, in the islands of Siphnos and Cyprus. Athens derived a considerable part of its revenue from the mines of Laurium in Attica. At first the profits derived from this source were distributed among the citizens, until Themistocles persuaded the general assembly of the people to devote them to the construction of ships of war. The battle of Salamis was won by the galleys built with the money thus obtained, so that the silver mines of Laurium have been the means of adding some of its brightest pages to the history of Ancient Greece. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the exhausted or neglected mines of the East, and of the Iberian peninsula, ceased to be the sources from which silver flowed over the world. The riches amassed during ages of civilisation were now scattered among barbarous hordes, or buried in the ruins of cities destroyed by fire; and as no new influx replaced the losses caused by accident or the slow wear of time, the precious metals gradually became more rare and of increasing value, until Germany began to open a new era in mining history, and for a time to take the lead among the silver-producing countries of the globe. The first discovery of this metal in Bohemia dates back as far as the seventh century; and in the tenth the Rammelsberg in the Hartz Mountains began to yield its still unexhausted treasures. In the twelfth century the silver mines of Saxony and Hungary were discovered, and at a much later period those of Kongsberg in Norway.